物理学史与哲学

A tradition handed down among physicists maintains that classical physics is a perfectly deterministic theory capable of predicting the future with absolute certainty, independently of any interpretations. It also tells that it was quantum…

Empirical confirmation in some areas of physics is obscure; for example in Hawking radiation. However, the analogue gravity can simulate these phenomena in condensed matter systems. That is an important question whether the observation of…

The (re)introduction of $\Lambda$ into cosmology has spurred debates that touch on central questions in philosophy of science, as well as the foundations of general relativity and particle physics. We provide a systematic assessment of the…

English translation of Russian book compiled to honor the memory of Ilya Mikhailovich Kapchinsky - To the 90th Birthday Collection of Memories. The idea for this publication belongs to Nikolai Vladimirovich Lazarev, a close collaborator of…

In the 60s of the last century the few courses of History of physics in Physics degree were held by scholars who, apart from a few exceptions, did not have a specific research background in the field. Some activities, books, social…

How can we explain the strange behavior of quantum and relativistic entities? Why do they behave in ways that defy our intuition about how physical entities should behave, considering our ordinary experience of the world around us? In this…

We put forward a new view of relativity theory that makes the existence of a flow of time compatible with the four-dimensional block universe. To this end, we apply the creation-discovery view elaborated for quantum mechanics to relativity…

We briefly review the scientific contributions of the late Prof. Ru-Keng Su in his academic life. In the area of intermediate and high-energy nuclear physics, Su explored various topics in high-energy nuclear physics and particle physics,…

As the European maritime powers expanded their reach beyond north Atlantic coastal waters to distant lands as far away as the East Indies, access to a practical means of maritime navigation in the southern hemisphere became imperative. The…

It is commonly known that the steady-state model of the universe was proposed and championed in a series of influential papers around mid-twenty century by Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi, and Thomas Gold. In contrast it is little known that,…

After World War II, a hyper-pragmatic paradigm was established in physics in most of the western countries, within which foundations of quantum mechanics were vastly dismissed as pointless speculations. In this paper, we show that in Italy,…

Observational astronomy is plagued with selection effects that must be taken into account when interpreting data from astronomical surveys. Because of the physical limitations of observing time and instrument sensitivity, datasets are…

Time, space, and matter are categories of our reasoning, whose properties appear to be fundamental. However, these require a scrutiny as in the extreme regime of the primordial universe these present quantum properties. What does it mean…

Discussions on indeterminism in physics focus on the possibility of an open future, i.e. the possibility of having potential alternative future events, the realisation of one of which is not fully determined by the present state of affairs.…

In October 1604, when SN1604, the last naked-eye visible supernova in our Galaxy, exploded, Galileo Galilei was the professor of mathematics and astronomy at the University of Padua, teaching the mechanics of planets. He was therefore the…

The history of the Institute of Physics at the University of Florence is traced from the beginning of the 20th century, with the arrival of Antonio Garbasso as Director (1913), to the 1960s. Thanks to Garbasso's expertise, not only did the…

We argue that taxonomical concept development is vital for planetary science as in all branches of science, but its importance has been obscured by unique historical developments. The literature shows that the concept of planet developed by…

I want to give an impression of the time I spent together with John S. Bell, of the atmosphere of our collaboration and friendship. I briefly review our work, the methods of nonrelativistic approximations to quantum field theory for…

E. B. Gliner started his scientific career in 1963 at the age of 40. In 1965, when the existence of the cosmological constant $\lambda$ seemed unnecessary to most cosmologists, he renewed interest in the problem by emphasizing a material…

We describe the earliest measurements of the DT fusion cross section commissioned by the Manhattan Project, first at Purdue University in 1943 and then at Los Alamos 1945-6 and later, in 1951-2. The Los Alamos measurements led to the…